I'm a serial entrepreneur based in Chicago, and I love all things related to startup life. I'm CEO and cofounder of matchist, the leading matching site for entrepreneurs and startups to find top quality developers. I'm also cofounder of Entrepreneurs Unpluggd, a media and events company that shares entrepreneurs' stories. I'm currently getting my MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Previously, I was a founding member of FeeFighters, a venture backed payments startup acquired by Groupon in 2012.

Perspective: A Powerful Tool for Entrepreneurs

When you’re building a startup, it’s really, really hard to maintain a healthy perspective on your company. Most entrepreneurs (myself included) are type A personalities who are always thinking about the next big thing or problem in their companies. This is why we need to maintain perspective as we aim to benchmark ourselves and our companies against others who seem more successful.

One of my favorite startup quotes is this: building a company is a marathon, not a sprint. While it may seem from popular media that successful companies seemingly rise up overnight from the garages of teenage kids, this urban legend is just that…a legend. After recently reading Steve Jobs‘ biography, I learned a lot of details that are not celebrated in our popular narrative about Apple: Jobs was ousted out of his own company in the 80s after the Macintosh flopped, and went on to start another failed technology company (before Pixar of course). He was actually kind of a terrible person: insulting employees, taking credit for ideas not his own, and having a celebrated temper. Why don’t we hear about that when we talk about his legacy?

And how about those teenage kids? A Kauffman Foundationstudy shows that the average age of first-time entrepreneurs in all industries is 43; in tech industries, the average age is 39.

In the great marathon of startup life, teaching yourself to maintain perspective is an easy way to keep your sanity when things seem to be going less than perfectly. A startup’s life cycle features many “troughs of sorrow”(the hardest part when most entrepreneurs drop out). As you’re going through these tough times, a bit of perspective offers some encouragement and the will to power on.

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